The content team
knows things
I do not know.
They know the brand’s history — campaigns that worked and didn’t work, positions tried and abandoned, clients who pushed back on specific framings.
They know the organization’s culture in ways I will never fully know, having arrived after that culture has formed.
They know the audience in the granular, accumulated way of people who have been reading responses and comments and support tickets for years.
I know things they do not know, too.
I have pattern recognition across organizations they have not worked in. When A happens, B and C will almost assuredly be happening. This is valuable.
I have distance from internal politics that often lets me see certain things more clearly, even if I know better than to blab about them.
I also happen to have the specific expertise they brought me in for.
A fractional editorial engagement works when both kinds of knowledge, mine and the team’s, are in the room and treating each other as a resource rather than an obstacle.
It fails when either party mistakes their knowledge for the whole picture.
In the First Months:
Listen Before You Lead
The instinct of an arriving editor is to demonstrate their value quickly. This instinct is not wrong — you obviously need to reassure everybody by proving your worth — but the way most fractional editors do it is backwards.
They arrive with recommendations. They surface problems. They propose changes. They are demonstrating expertise through output, which is what they know how to do.
What they should be doing in the first weeks is listening.
Not passively — actively.
What does the team think is working? What are they frustrated about? What have they tried that did not work, and why do they think it did not work? What do they know about the audience that did not make it into any document?
This is irreplaceable data that is unavailable anywhere but from the people who have it.
A fractional editor who skips this step builds their work on incomplete information and will spend months wondering why there’s friction, why the internal team is resistant.
The internal team is resistant because the recommendations do not reflect what the internal team knows. So grab what the internal team knows first.
Making the Feedback
Relationship Work
The most structurally fraught part of a fractional editorial engagement is the feedback relationship.
as a fractional editor you’ve been brought in, partly, to raise the quality of the content. This means giving feedback to people who have been doing their jobs without this feedback, in some cases for years. This can go bad-to-terribly, in either direction.
Too harsh, you damage the working relationship and demoralize the writers, which will grind the production gears in ways that are hard to track and harder to heal.
Too soft, you are not doing your job.
Here’s the frame I use:
feedback is a transfer of information, not a judgment of a person. The question I am trying to answer in all feedback is “what does this writer need to understand to make better decisions on the next piece?” Not “what is wrong with this piece” — what does this writer need to learn.
This frame changes the feedback. It makes it more specific, because you are offering the writer something useful rather than cataloging problems. It makes it less punitive, because you’re addressing the future and not evaluating the past. And it makes it more honest, because useful information is more honest than vague reassurance.
The Division of Labor
That Works
The fractional editor is not the internal team’s manager.
They are not responsible for the operational health of the content function — calendar, workflow, stakeholder coordination. These things still belong to whoever owns them internally.
The fractional editor is responsible for the editorial standard. For whether the content that goes out is good. For calls about what to publish, what to hold back, what direction to push the work in.
This division works when it is explicit. When both parties understand the fractional editor’s editorial authority and the internal team’s operational authority, and neither is trying to do the other’s job.
When it is not explicit, you get confusion about who decides what, which produces power struggles and power vacuums — and the content suffers, and that’s on you.
Have the conversation about the division of labor at the start of the engagement, not after (or during) the first conflict.
You and the content folks are on the same side of the desk.
You are the same amount of editorially and writing-minded and skilled. There is no daylight between what you want and what they want. So listen first, and then hold steady.
I write about content strategy, fractional editorial leadership, and professional dynamics in this kind of work.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative